Which MMO mechanic do you think needs improvement most?

Loke666

Most MMOs today have pretty similar features, some have been improved a lot during the years while others have more or less been the same since Meridian 59. There arre certainly room for improvement in all of them but which one would you improve and why?

A few of them:
Storyprogression: Most games today progress the story with quests to keep the players busy and tell the story of the character and the world they live in. M59 already had a limited version of this but most early games mainly had players go out and kill stuff in the open world without any pointers. A few modern games uses dynamic events to either replace quests or as optional content.

Skill use: Almost all games uses cooldown but a few games have instead had a point system, usually besides the cooldowns for stuff like magic, or in GW2s case for the thiefs combat skills.

Group dynamic: The holy trinity is the standard system but certain games are trying out other ways and some games just lack it altogether.

Crafting: The standard system let you learn a crafting skill by crafting items around your current skill rating. A few had used other systems as well or like GW1 just let a merchant craft things for you if you had the mats and money.

Gathering: Almost all games uses nodes to get certain materials from as well as monster drops. Some also let you get materials from old gear.

Progression: Levels is the standard progression, some games had skills instead that rise with use or in some cases gives you points to place out as you progress (like TSW).

And there are of course plenty of other stuff like player housing, trading, achivements and so on... A bit too many to actually make a poll that would be useful.

nariusseldon

Difficulty slider. Few MMO has it, and sometimes too crude (like normal vs heroic only). But it can get rid of all the complaints about content being too easy or too difficult. 

Loke666

nariusseldon said:

Difficulty slider. Few MMO has it, and sometimes too crude (like normal vs heroic only). But it can get rid of all the complaints about content being too easy or too difficult. 

Good one. Would you make it as a slider just for dungeons, have open world maps with it as well (Gw1 have that, even though "open world" might be the wrong word for it there) or have the entire server at a set difficulty?

You do need to affect the loot to get the risk Vs reward right of course.

The problem is of course that it do split up the community  so you probably need mega servers for it to really work or the game will feel pretty empty.

nariusseldon

Loke666 said:

nariusseldon said:

Difficulty slider. Few MMO has it, and sometimes too crude (like normal vs heroic only). But it can get rid of all the complaints about content being too easy or too difficult. 

Good one. Would you make it as a slider just for dungeons, have open world maps with it as well (Gw1 have that, even though "open world" might be the wrong word for it there) or have the entire server at a set difficulty?

You do need to affect the loot to get the risk Vs reward right of course.

The problem is of course that it do split up the community  so you probably need mega servers for it to really work or the game will feel pretty empty.

Dungeons .. a lot of MMO content is instanced anyway. Why bother with the open world when most just treat it as a glorified lobby? Dungeon, scripted, content is more fun anyway.

And yes, you need to tweak the loot too. But that is easily done. Just copy Diablo 3. You literally have infinite scaling of difficulty (greater rifts), and rewards are scaled too.

And yes, you will split up the community. But so what. How many (aside from some here) care about that? As long as you can hit a button and some guys show up for your dungeon, it is fine.

Volgore

I'll throw in a "XPSlider".
I want to level at my own pace and set my own speed. No more getting rushed through content because the devs want me to grind at endgame, no more tons of grey quests in all the zones before i could finish them.

Let me set my own XP-gain to -90% and crawl through the world so slow that other players whisper me if everything's ok!!

ceratop001

I like games where the players actually change the environment by their actions. I guess I mean an environment that is never the same but molded by the players. It can either look really nice or really bad depending on the community. I think that type of environment is more akin to real life and possibly might induce more of an immersive experience. Some games have tried it but I would like to see it really worked on and implemented.

Not sure if that falls under mechanic so pre-apologize.

SavageHorizon

Torval said:

I would also like to see difficulty and xp sliders in most every game. I use the XP slider in EQ2 all the time.

The thing I would like to see worked on and needs the most improvement is mob/npc AI. That really needs a lot of work. One thing I credit the EQN team for even thinking about in a modern mmo is focusing on npc/mob behavior. Some other teams have done this too, but overall it's been neglected and needs work.

Difficulty sliders in an mmo is pathetic and dumb plus mob AI/behavior is pretty good in some MMO'S like Ryzom and Age Of Wulin.

waynejr2

SavageHorizon said:

Torval said:

I would also like to see difficulty and xp sliders in most every game. I use the XP slider in EQ2 all the time.

The thing I would like to see worked on and needs the most improvement is mob/npc AI. That really needs a lot of work. One thing I credit the EQN team for even thinking about in a modern mmo is focusing on npc/mob behavior. Some other teams have done this too, but overall it's been neglected and needs work.

Difficulty sliders in an mmo is pathetic and dumb plus mob AI/behavior is pretty good in some MMO'S like Ryzom and Age Of Wulin.

Difficulty slider in CoH was great!

waynejr2

Loke666 said:

Most MMOs today have pretty similar features, some have been improved a lot during the years while others have more or less been the same since Meridian 59. There arre certainly room for improvement in all of them but which one would you improve and why?

A few of them:
Storyprogression: Most games today progress the story with quests to keep the players busy and tell the story of the character and the world they live in. M59 already had a limited version of this but most early games mainly had players go out and kill stuff in the open world without any pointers. A few modern games uses dynamic events to either replace quests or as optional content.

Skill use: Almost all games uses cooldown but a few games have instead had a point system, usually besides the cooldowns for stuff like magic, or in GW2s case for the thiefs combat skills.

Group dynamic: The holy trinity is the standard system but certain games are trying out other ways and some games just lack it altogether.

Crafting: The standard system let you learn a crafting skill by crafting items around your current skill rating. A few had used other systems as well or like GW1 just let a merchant craft things for you if you had the mats and money.

Gathering: Almost all games uses nodes to get certain materials from as well as monster drops. Some also let you get materials from old gear.

Progression: Levels is the standard progression, some games had skills instead that rise with use or in some cases gives you points to place out as you progress (like TSW).

And there are of course plenty of other stuff like player housing, trading, achivements and so on... A bit too many to actually make a poll that would be useful.

Story is a framing device for adventure/quests not a game mechanic.  quests are a game mechanic.

netglen

Volgore said:

I'll throw in a "XPSlider".

EQ2 has a XP-slider  where you can even cease all leveling. It also has a AA-slider where you can divert normal XP gain towards Alternate Achievement advancement.

Bjelar

I would say competitive gameplay. People like to optimize and min/max stuff. Well let them do so then, and make leaderboards and give out MTX-prizes. You power level to level cap in a day? Well, do you want to compete? Let's have events like who can get to level cap the fastest. Stream it. Even advertize it. I would pay just to watch.

Sid_Vicious

MMORPGs are missing this:

PVP bragging rights.. a title that is very difficult to earn or something like the infamy system that Vanguard had (score started at 100 and you took 10% of everyone's score you killed).. not enough MMORPGs have a PVP grind like this.

PVP quests.. ESO is starting to get it right and other MMOs should learn from this... but I think they could be done way better.

real risk vs reward is missing in most MMOs

randonly generated rogue-like content (wandering mobs, loot, resources or maybe even a dungeons layout)

crafting game within a game better than what is out there today, Vanguard was getting it right... and more crafting quests

diplomacy (preferably a game within the game like Vanguard did) and factions with NPC that meant something, like unlocking special PVE content

GM or maybe even player controlled mobs or an AI so good you cannot even tell when they are controlled and mobs that gain experience and get tougher, similar to the original Darkfall but done better

GM events that come and go only once, telling a story and having something fun to do or something cool to compete for... world changing events hopefully.

class that buffs everyones speed faster than a mount (like a bard in Vanguard)

group harvesting benefits and gear

constantly coming up with new loot that is once of a kind (like a necklace that there is only one of, etc.)

netglen

Sid_Vicious said:

MMORPGs are missing this:
PVP bragging rights.. a title that is very difficult to earn or something like the infamy system that Vanguard had (score started at 100 and you took 10% of everyone's score you killed).. not enough MMORPGs have a 

Anarchy Online has a structured PVP titles. When I played they were Freshman, Rookie, Apprentice, Novice, Neophyte, Experienced, Expert, Master, Champion, Grandmaster. Now it looks like each class/profession has their own set of bragging PVP titles. Personally I found them to be a royal pain because you find some players who will cease to PVP and run away to maintain their titles because you can loose rank if you get defeated too much. Some of our guildies got so sick of the system that they let themselves get knocked down to Freshman title so they can have fun PVPing again.

As for classes that buff speed, Anarchy Online has Adventures & Fixers that grant speed buffs. Both Everquest 1 & 2 has various buffing classes like Bards, Druids, Shamans that grant speed buffs. 

EQ2 has several crafting quests systems plus gear to help with crafting & gathering. There is a crafting Work Order system with normal and rush orders that can aid your with leveling your crafting level.

Octagon7711

nariusseldon said:

Loke666 said:

nariusseldon said:

Difficulty slider. Few MMO has it, and sometimes too crude (like normal vs heroic only). But it can get rid of all the complaints about content being too easy or too difficult. 

Good one. Would you make it as a slider just for dungeons, have open world maps with it as well (Gw1 have that, even though "open world" might be the wrong word for it there) or have the entire server at a set difficulty?

You do need to affect the loot to get the risk Vs reward right of course.

The problem is of course that it do split up the community  so you probably need mega servers for it to really work or the game will feel pretty empty.

Dungeons .. a lot of MMO content is instanced anyway. Why bother with the open world when most just treat it as a glorified lobby? Dungeon, scripted, content is more fun anyway.

And yes, you need to tweak the loot too. But that is easily done. Just copy Diablo 3. You literally have infinite scaling of difficulty (greater rifts), and rewards are scaled too.

And yes, you will split up the community. But so what. How many (aside from some here) care about that? As long as you can hit a button and some guys show up for your dungeon, it is fine.

STO has a difficulty slider for most of it's content.  It doesn't appear to split the community.  It's understood, the greater the difficulty the better the loot.  No problem there.

Octagon7711

I like the off line training like in Eve.  It's nice to login and see you can now pilot certain ships you couldn't before.  They should do that with other things like weapons mastery in other games.

Octagon7711

Player created content.  A few games let players submit quests and some have been really good.  

rodingo

netglen said:

Sid_Vicious said:

MMORPGs are missing this:
PVP bragging rights.. a title that is very difficult to earn or something like the infamy system that Vanguard had (score started at 100 and you took 10% of everyone's score you killed).. not enough MMORPGs have a 

Anarchy Online has a structured PVP titles. When I played they were Freshman, Rookie, Apprentice, Novice, Neophyte, Experienced, Expert, Master, Champion, Grandmaster. Now it looks like each class/profession has their own set of bragging PVP titles. Personally I found them to be a royal pain because you find some players who will cease to PVP and run away to maintain their titles because you can loose rank if you get defeated too much. Some of our guildies got so sick of the system that they let themselves get knocked down to Freshman title so they can have fun PVPing again.

SWTOR has PVP titles too.  I also remember having PVP ranks you could display in WoW back when they first introduced the honor system and battlegrounds.

nariusseldon

Volgore said:

I'll throw in a "XPSlider".
I want to level at my own pace and set my own speed. No more getting rushed through content because the devs want me to grind at endgame, no more tons of grey quests in all the zones before i could finish them.

Let me set my own XP-gain to -90% and crawl through the world so slow that other players whisper me if everything's ok!!

I probably won't play with you .. but i agree that more personal customization of the game, the better.

In fact, a xp slider will also allow those who only like end-game to get there in a jiffy. So both you and them will be happy.

waynejr2

Octagon7711 said:

Player created content.  A few games let players submit quests and some have been really good.  

just don't give rewards for running the quest.  It is obvious why you shouldn't.  If anyone reading this has to ask why.  Wow, just wow.

moosecatlol

Loot, rarely will you ever see a game that rewards loot based on skill.

H0urg1ass

Story Progression:  I prefer a mix of sandbox and themepark elements when it comes to games.  I like raids. I think they're fun and I think that stories can be built up around this type of purposefully injected content such as quests and dungeons.  

At same time, I feel that large portions of the world should be able to be owned, and shaped through construction, by players. This will allow players to generate their own content with each other through territorial conquest, treaties, embargoes or just plain old sieges and PVP.

Skill Set:  I would like to see a system where a player starts off with a set of initial skills and then, through gameplay, they earn skill points to put towards Attributes, Skills, Character Traits, Special Abilities, Spells... ect.  Essentially allow players to build their own characters around whatever play styles suit them.  Yes, plural, meaning you shouldn't need 5 different characters to do five different things in the game.  As much as I like EVE, I would prefer a system where SP's are earned through play rather than offline with a subscription. Players should have to log in and do something to earn their character experience.

Different armors should effect a players ability to use certain weapons and spells.  For instance, all spells should have a somatic and verbal component.  You can't move very well in full plate armor, so your spells have a high chance to fail.  In cloth robes, however, movement and speech are not constricted, therefore your spells have little chance of failing.

Group Dynamic:  The trinity is really one role short.  It should actually be four classes.  Tank, Healer, DPS and Control.  As noted above, a character should be able to be as weak or as strong in their role as they choose.  If someone spreads their skills into both tank and healer, then they won't be as good at either in a pure single role sense, but they might be able to solo a lot easier.

A solo PVP'er, for instance, would probably want some tank, some heals and some DPS in order to be self sufficient.  Or maybe they want to be tank and DPS and just hope they have enough HP to survive the fight without self heals.

Crafting:  I think that the PVE content in the game should feed crafting and crafting should feedback into both PVE and PVP.  I think that gear should deteriorate over time and damage meaning that it will always have to be replaced at some point.  In certain PVP zones, your gear should randomly drop or be destroyed on death. This way crafters always have something to sell.

Additionally, raids should not be for gear, but for high end crafting materials.  If you want some nice higher tier gear to PVP in, then someone has to raid for it.  The materials should always correspond to the creature killed.  As in there should be many different items that all require different parts of, say, a dragon's body.  So you go to raid and you slay a dragon and it drops 500 scales, 20 toenails, 2 eyes, 1 tongue... ect.  Each part is needed for a different crafted item and have different values.  Scales aren't worth as much on the market as Eyes or Tongues for instance, but of course the market would be player controlled and driven by supply and demand.

Loke666

DMKano said:

The biggest downside to MMORPGs is the huge time investment needed to progress - over time this creates a disparity - veteran players with lots of play time far ahead and players with little time being far behind.

The time investment being what separates haves from have nots - it could be done better.

Typical MMORPG - you log out and your character is removed from the world and your progress comes to a halt.

How about having player characters remain in game as intelligent NPCs that continue to progress on their own. This way if you take a vacation or just need a break - you don't come back to your guild and find that you've fallen off the tracks.

The tech needed to make this work in a spectacular way would sure push AI and server processing to the max - but it would push the genre forward in leaps and bounds.

It would open up MMORPGs for people who have very little time, even people who might only have a smartphone and would be able to give simple commands or check on the progress of their "NPCs" periodically.

The evolution of MMORPGs lies in unattended gameplay IMO - remove the burden of time investment.

Interesting... 
Pretty hard to implement with current MMO AIs of course unless your character will just stand in their player owned store, work on their farm and go to sleep during nighttime when you log off but already that would make the game more interesting. I could see a character first working on his field, then go to the market and sell vegetables and finish by going to the tavern and have a beer with other off line characters. It would certainly make the game feel more alive.

There is the question on how much your character should do when you are off, stuff like running dungeons are probably too much.

Sid_Vicious

Loke666 said:

DMKano said:

The biggest downside to MMORPGs is the huge time investment needed to progress - over time this creates a disparity - veteran players with lots of play time far ahead and players with little time being far behind.

The time investment being what separates haves from have nots - it could be done better.

Typical MMORPG - you log out and your character is removed from the world and your progress comes to a halt.

How about having player characters remain in game as intelligent NPCs that continue to progress on their own. This way if you take a vacation or just need a break - you don't come back to your guild and find that you've fallen off the tracks.

The tech needed to make this work in a spectacular way would sure push AI and server processing to the max - but it would push the genre forward in leaps and bounds.

It would open up MMORPGs for people who have very little time, even people who might only have a smartphone and would be able to give simple commands or check on the progress of their "NPCs" periodically.

The evolution of MMORPGs lies in unattended gameplay IMO - remove the burden of time investment.

Interesting... 
Pretty hard to implement with current MMO AIs of course unless your character will just stand in their player owned store, work on their farm and go to sleep during nighttime when you log off but already that would make the game more interesting. I could see a character first working on his field, then go to the market and sell vegetables and finish by going to the tavern and have a beer with other off line characters. It would certainly make the game feel more alive.

There is the question on how much your character should do when you are off, stuff like running dungeons are probably too much.

Yeah if you hung out in a tavern or something that would be cool.. would help you to see how many people are 'playing' the game too. I loved 'drinking alcohol' in Guild Wars.. that was pretty cool.

All we have left are indie companies though. Are you sure you want them to spend the time on doing that? When there are other things they could put their work into? Thats the sad reality we have to be more aware of.

EQ next cancelled.. of course.... fck SOE

fck consoles.

fck WOW

Now take a real look at what we have 2016.. remember what we lost.

Gdemami

DMKano said:

The biggest downside to MMORPGs is the huge time investment needed to progress - over time this creates a disparity - veteran players with lots of play time far ahead and players with little time being far behind.

The time investment being what separates haves from have nots - it could be done better.

Typical MMORPG - you log out and your character is removed from the world and your progress comes to a halt.

How about having player characters remain in game as intelligent NPCs that continue to progress on their own. This way if you take a vacation or just need a break - you don't come back to your guild and find that you've fallen off the tracks.

The tech needed to make this work in a spectacular way would sure push AI and server processing to the max - but it would push the genre forward in leaps and bounds.

It would open up MMORPGs for people who have very little time, even people who might only have a smartphone and would be able to give simple commands or check on the progress of their "NPCs" periodically.

The evolution of MMORPGs lies in unattended gameplay IMO - remove the burden of time investment.

That would trivialize the progression for those who are actually online, playing the game and making an "effort".

The root "issue" is vertical character/power progression that creates the disparities but at the same time people love it thus it either is not going away or you would need to replace it with something equally enticing - and afk progression ain't filling that spot.

Vermillion_Raventhal

I would say total focus on progression with lack of focus on player interactions. 

Predictably.  This genre is way to predictable. You can log on to most gamea and know what is going to happen.  Battles are pretty safe, scales and static.  Progression is generic.

Solar_Prophet

The world, specifically monster spawns. Every MMO I can think of has groups of the same monsters spawning in the same place, standing around waiting to be killed. Why can't they move? Why is it the same ones, regardless of the season, time of day, etc? Why don't packs of carnivorous monsters attack the herbivores? For that matter, why can't packs of carnivores, or even individual creatures, vie for hunting grounds? 

I guess what I'm asking is why don't animals and other enemies behave in a similar fashion to how they do IRL? There are all kinds of relationships in an ecosystem, yet no MMO in the last decade or so has even attempted to make their world's ecology seem the slightest bit realistic. In fact, only one MMO I know of has ever tried, period.

Saga of Ryzom's model is far from perfect, but at least they tried! Their monsters move about, carnivores hunt (and even use simple pack tactics, such as ambushes) and even migrate across the map during certain seasons. It gives a sense of legitimacy to the world. Your character may be the star of the story, but the world doesn't care if they die to the first kobold they come across, or slays the evil dragon-wizard and gets the princess. With or without you, the world goes on, and that's something many MMOs just don't bother to address. 

Oh, and reskinning lower level monsters, cranking up their stats, and dropping them in the higher level areas needs to stop. I'm actually surprised they haven't resorted to just reversing the names of the lower level mobs for the high level versions yet. 

Level five Kobold = level 100 Dlobok.